It seems like what you're arguing (re my earlier comment about professional poker) is that whether or not there are stakes/it's "just for fun" vs "deeply serious" doesn't actually matter at all to phenomenology? Cuz a gamified workplace is not "just a game" and mgmt I think puts real pressure/stakes on ("here are the consequences of not hitting scores..."). It's only a game in a very token sense of taking on some of the formal properties (and thereby channeling certain psychological dynamics) of games.

I guess I'm slightly confused b/c sometimes it feels like you distinguish deadly seriousness from "just for fun," and sometimes they seem to coincide (eg in Huizinga's religion+play are same thing idea)—and then there're the levels of affect vs knowledge, and whether something "is" or "isn't" play on each of these levels.

On which "level" (affect/knowledge) is gamified activity serious vs for fun, and what concretely would a player "somehow chang[ing] their relationship... in terms of knowledge or in terms of affect" look like w/r/t this?

I think in general clarifying the relationships between these four possibilities (known seriousness, affective seriousness, known play, affective play) at the end of this piece, vis-a-vis these examples of dating and gamification, would help clarify a lot—I sorta expect the pieces to cohere but am left more confused by how they relate than when I started the bullet point

hehe feels like nominalist circularity—a game is what participants consider a game

I guess I probably want a "citation" here (in the loose sense of, "What is your basis for claiming this?"). I don't have a ton of experience personally with cult types, but thinking of e.g. LW types, or stories I've read/seen, I feel like people really do fully buy in. Well, at least in terms of what they consciously pay lip service to... Hard to know what anyone really thinks/always possible to say they're engaging in false consciousness.

Does this resonate with you phenomenologically? I guess I can't quite make it click with my experience, trying to find an opening for it to resonate

Have you noticed (I'm sure you have) it feels to me like nearly every non-analytic-inclined philosopher I read either cites Leibniz or Spinoza (but rarely both at the same time), and it's typically a metaphorical reading of their #ontological-flex frames applied to whatever the citing philosopher is talking about

You reckon it's just baked deep into the canon, or that these guys are (almost like scifi writers, or the Bible) exceptionally good at producing resonant images, dynamics, etc?

Yeah good example, I guess I wonder if this is an interesting exception to the rule, or the sort of exception that makes you realize an entire paradigm shift is necessary. Cuz I do think there usually is synchronicity between thoughts and feelings—feelings alter your thought patterns, thought patterns alter your feelings—but sometimes it obviously breaks down. Wonder what the terrain of dynamics looks like

Yeah it's interesting, playing immersive FPS games, my heartrate jacks up massively—there's a level at which (phenomenologically it feels like) my mind "knows" I'm in a game and my body doesn't

Interesting to compare this to Bourdieu's habitus concept, which tries to transcend the objective/subjective dichotomy in a "Duet For One" (Friston) type way, by talking about how social members' psychological models need to be loosely synchronized by the same objective set of cultural circumstances (structural relations, life experiences, linguistic norms, etc) in order to coordinate activities—so that an interaction is not just between two people, but between two visions of the same society.

An example might help here, I've re-read the sentence a few times but am not quite sure what this would mean/look like

Pretty wild/ballsy claim—banishes the usual lighthearted vs serious, "for fun" vs "for stakes" distinction that tends to defines play & religion... What's his case for religion originally being play? Does he have an anthro case or is it more a "speculative fiction" theory type thing?

As knowledge logisticians we would be remiss to not note that Bateson is riffing on a long history of, & contemporary discourse around, no-win situations—Orwell's doublethink comes from 1949; Heller came up with catch-22 at the exact same time. The double bind feels a bit like a Scylla/Charybdis, rock and a hard place, damned if I do/damned if I don't situation where the false dilemma is artificially created by an agent with power?

One important distinction feels like whether the messaging is contradictory, or whether the actual feedback is a catch-22.

Also famously a characteristic of psychedelic experience—cf REBUS relaxation & re-annealing.

"Appropriately" doing a lot of work here—either "in a way advantageous to the subject" or "as expected by other members of society" seem like two possible ways to unpack, which are linked insofar as, in cooperative situations, not meeting expectations causes trouble

This is an idea Bateson first developed while hanging out around sea otters in Central/Northern California—that there was some "meta" communication happening that told other otters the way later actions ought to be interpreted, e.g. that biting and nipping ought to be interpreted a play instead of as aggression and conflict.

Goffman went on to turn this into his theory of frames, strips, and keys outlined in Frame Analysis, and the concept of "framing" has seeped into the colloquialized ground water ever since.

My feeling is that the hermeneutic circle (part alters understanding of whole alters understanding of part) is a better metaphor than a "meta communication strip"—in other words, that frames are built up and emerge from a set of actions which, when considered together, suggest the whole. The otter does not announce the "class" of play so much as his actions and the context he's within together suggest a class, and this suggested class top-down alters how subsequent actions are understood. (Such that there can be uncertain liminal zones while e.g. play transitions to real aggression, and you find yourself asking, "Is this for real now or what?") This may be a fake distinction though—the "how" of actions is not so different from the "what" of actions-as-composites.

This idea, AFAIK, originally comes from Henri Berger, who talked about tripping as archetypally funny—you think the curb is here, but it's there, and now you're sprawled out, and folks are laughing at you.

Dennett & Hurley expand on this idea in Inside Jokes which basically argues that jokes are "debuggers" that lead us to false conclusions, then pull the rug out. Ragged and I argued in "Predictive Hermeneutics" that a lot of avant art works this way too. Of course, it's only funny/art if the surprise is somehow low stakes (as is true in most "simulations" like stories, film), so that the learning/debugging is pleasurable or interesting instead of stressful and costly.

It seems like humor is an example where subversion of the frame is a subset of the larger phenomenon, which is the subversion of earlier interpretive guesses in a hermeneutic process (part --> whole --> part). But I think this speaks to a larger slipperiness between "frame" and "piece of context that modifies meaning," which feels roughly analogous to the slipperiness between classes and instantiations, as well as to the slipperiness between "form" and "content."

IMO this is not only because we have an impoverished vocabulary; in part, we have an impoverished vocabulary because tone and gesture and expression are harder to dissimulate and produce than mere words—anyone can utter "I'm not lying," few can convincingly lie to someone who knows them well.

This sorta starts playing into the "frames are more often built up by action composites, rather than announced up front and then believed"—compare responses to someone saying "I'm being friendly," and then doing lots of aggro not-friendly things, to someone saying "I'm being a jerk" while being really happy and playful. The actions "anchor" the interpretation of the speech as honest or dishonest.

We could also call this "majority opinion," and ignore the question of truth.

This aphorism really refers to the kind of predictive, pragmatic truths you cite science as claiming. (And indeed, false cultural belief is typically modeled as a liability, in the game theory.)

Even here he has to bend backwards: "What is considered true" (which implies there is a truth separate from consideration)

"Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." (F.N.)

"Everything all the time" --> No clear assumption/expectation ground to update/subvert

As always, criticism like all human opinion is inherently reactionary, inherently situated. There are signals; there are correctives; it can be important to look in the middle to what could be cut out in narratives of bipolarity.

A. Saramandi: "She’s victim of a culture that bombards her with the message that she is in control, as long as she buys the necessary products, looks a certain way. In one of the most poignant moments of the novel, she doesn’t realise that this agency is a false god: when the narrator is molested by one of her father’s colleagues, she believes she was “letting [him] kiss me” and is confused as to why, since after all, as the epitome of desire, she must be responsible."

"I do think everybody wants to be a woman now to the degree that, well, the future is female but the future is narcissistic. And that's really true, it's like women really do have the monopoloy on narcissism... this public, crowd-sourced narcissism that is the selling point of social media." (Anna K, Red Scare)

See Venkatesh Rao, "The Principia Misanthropica": In the beginning, people were mostly unhappy, but not too unhappy about being unhappy.

cf rhetorical structure of assertion, support, cause/effect, further implications

See Eliezer Yudkowsky: his involvement with MIRI, his sequences, and the LessWrong community

Acerbic, damning.

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